Political theatre

Marathon training

America’s generals learn about Afghanistan through the stage

HISTORY may repeat itself, but we are rarely the wiser for it. And Afghanistan, that complicated, hapless place, has long been a victim of its geography. These are among the lessons of “The Great Game: Afghanistan”, a marathon of a dozen plays about the history of Western involvement in the country. Nicolas Kent, the artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre in London, commissioned these works from different writers at a time when he felt the public had stopped caring about Afghanistan. After a successful first run in London in 2009 “The Great Game” returned to Washington, DC, in mid-February at the behest of the Pentagon. Officials at the Defence Department thought it would be a good primer on Afghanistan for serving soldiers, veterans and politicians.

The plays are impressive for the way they convey the complexity of the country's past without wagging fingers. Presented chronologically in a nearly eight-hour trilogy, the cycle begins in Jalalabad in 1842, during the British and Indian army's bloody retreat from Kabul (“Bugles at the Gates of Jalalabad” by Stephen Jeffreys), and continues up till 2010, as a British soldier struggles to adjust to life at home after his time in Helmand (“Canopy of Stars” by Simon Stephens). The title, “The Great Game”, an expression popularised by Rudyard Kipling, is a reference to the way the British and Russian empires jockeyed for position in the region in the 19th century.

Performed by an unflagging cast of 14, the plays are a bit uneven and occasionally heavy on expositional details. But they are consistently engaging, and the accumulative effect is powerful. Viewers come away with a sense of Afghanistan's long history as a battleground for foreign interests and rival powers. Inevitably some moments are heavy with dramatic irony, such as in Lee Blessing's “Wood for the Fire”, in which an American CIA operative working in Pakistan in the 1980s declares, “We can't worry about tomorrow's wars today.” Yet this cycle is nuanced enough not to cast blame.

These plays “bring an immediacy to skirmishes read about in books,” said Josh Frey, an American serviceman. A member of the armed forces' new “AfPak Hands” programme, which immerses soldiers in language and culture training before sending them off to Afghanistan and Pakistan, he found that “The Great Game” offered a “personal connection” to the information he has been studying. Chris Groves, a commander in the Royal Navy, added that the cycle not only places the current war in context, but also gets across how difficult it is to make progress there.

The plays were put on at the Shakespeare Theatre with help from the British Council and the Bob Woodruff Foundation, an American non-profit organisation that seeks to help injured service members. The Pentagon is keen for more partnerships with the private sector, such as “Wartorn: 1861-2010”, a documentary about post-traumatic stress disorder which HBO broadcast in November, and which helped convey the needs of soldiers to a wider audience. “There is an assumption that the arts and our men and women in uniform are from different planets,” a Defence Department spokesman told The Economist. “It's not the case. We're all in this together.”